Elijah walked out, and I was alone again, listening to the music: sad, dreamy stuff. I felt displaced, floating, as if my vision and sense of direction were suddenly impaired. I thought, I don’t understand anything. Only what existed in that room. The sounds of the band. The sounds of bottles. The sounds of New York towns being spoken aloud like spells. The smell of salt, beer, and fried fish. The smell of damp wood. The dim light. The sense of companionship between me and Gin and Soda and the bartender and the tourists from New York and Sebastian and the other fishermen.

The scotch went straight to my hands, weighed them down, turned them heavy and tingly. I felt out of touch with them, with my whole real corporeal self.

“There are three types of people in this world,” I told Eliot Moniz when he brought me one more Glenmorangie. “The ones who are dangerous. The ones who love the ones who are dangerous. And the ones who protect the ones who love the ones who are dangerous.”

“True enough,” Eliot said.

I was a little drunk.

“But which one am I?” I asked.

“I guess that’s the question,” Eliot said.

I went into the bathroom. It was a tiny room with a sink, a stall, and one open window letting in the smell of the ocean. In the bathroom mirror, my lips were swollen and my pupils enlarged. I recognized something I’d seen in other faces, usually at the bar after midnight when people began to look like their doppelgängers. It was as if something I was used to seeing on my face had been lifted, some subtle shading of constraint. Underneath was another self, someone I didn’t know at all.

When I flushed the toilet, I heard my name, but it was immediately swallowed by the sound of the water rushing through pipes. I ran my hands under hot water and looked at myself again in the mirror above the sink. I listened, but I didn’t hear anything except the faint thump of the music.

Someone knocked and I jumped. “Someone’s in here,” I said.

“Lydia,” I heard.

It was Cole. I looked at my reflection, looked hard into the eyes of that twin. Asked her what we were going to do exactly, although on some level I already knew. We were going to be in control, for fuck’s sake, we were going to take the reins. We were going to protect all that was ours.

I unlocked the door and he came in. We looked at each other.

“It’s almost midnight,” he said.

“I know that.”

“We didn’t know where you were.”

I shook my head. “What? Did I miss my curfew again?”

“Funny,” he said. “But really. I can’t sleep when I don’t know where you are.”

“Aha,” I said. “But you don’t sleep.”

“Okay, okay,” he said. “No need for sarcasm.”